Susan Povich, an owner of the Red Hook Lobster Pound, cast a desultory glance around her market and takeout shop on Van Brunt Street, the main strip of a seaside neighborhood in Brooklyn still struggling to its feet after Hurricane Sandy’s pounding.

Repairs from the deluge were going slower than she had hoped. Two workers hired to frame out and panel the walls had just locked themselves out while getting takeout food. The light fixture from California that had supposedly been delivered was nowhere to be found. Topping it off, Ms. Povich’s husband and business partner, Ralph Gorham, was home in bed with a stomach virus, compelling his wife to teasingly call him Mr. Manflu, yet also leaving her adrift.

“It’s hard when Ralph’s sick,” Ms. Povich said. “We’re a team.”

Like many business owners racing to reopen in Red Hook, Ms. Povich and her husband are eager to have their market up and running as soon as possible. Ms. Povich has set her sights on Valentine’s Day, and February has become the target month for several other still-shuttered businesses nearby. But hurdles keep surfacing for them all. Plumbing fixtures leak. A heating unit will not turn on. Contractors stop showing up or returning calls.

“Every time we think we can open, there’s something else,” said Leisah Swenson, an owner of Home/Made, a tiny Red Hook restaurant that is to open for brunch this weekend.

Several businesses reopened weeks and even months ago. Fort Defiance, a cafe and bar, staged a triumphant return the night before Thanksgiving with a pig roast, drawing crowds that spilled onto the sidewalk and ate every scrap. The Good Fork restaurant reopened on New Year’s Eve, selling out both seatings. Other places were all but unscathed by the waters, either by luck — like Baked, a coffeehouse, and Hope and Anchor, a restaurant on a small knoll on Van Brunt Street — or by design, like Brooklyn Crab, which was built 12 feet above ground on thick wooden stilts.

Yet the Lobster Pound, Home/Made and Sunny’s bar, a cherished neighborhood stalwart, are among the businesses still closed, clouding the already forlorn air that hangs over Red Hook these days. Winter is always the neighborhood’s slow season, but this one is even quieter, with the nearest subway stop long closed for repairs, and Fairway Market, the giant grocery store that anchors the neighborhood, still shut.

“People are coming specifically to be in Red Hook and go to restaurants or shopping,” said Monica Byrne, who, with Ms. Swenson, owns Home/Made. “But it’s not nearly what we need at all.”

Hopes remain pinned on the reopening of the Fairway, where dozens of workers have descended like soldier ants, laboring to get the store up and running by the end of February.

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One day last week, Howard Glickberg, whose grandfather founded Fairway, stopped with his son Dan Glickberg to check on the progress. Sixty new refrigerator cases had arrived. Workers were power-washing salt marks off the walls. The electrical cables running to the building from the on-site power plant would have to be replaced. Repairing and reopening the store, Mr. Glickberg said, would cost close to $10 million. “We want to open as quickly as possible,” he said. “All the local businesses say we’re a linchpin.”

Nine blocks up Van Brunt, just south of the Lobster Pound and beneath a leaden sky, a young man with a bushy mohawk and bejeweled combat boots sawed through metal posts. He was helping Ms. Swenson of Home/Made build new tables. Ms. Swenson and Ms. Byrne, partners in business and life, had already rewired the entire shop, installed new breakers and a boiler, and scrubbed, disinfected, primed and repainted the wood floor.

But problems kept surfacing. The combination unit for heat and air-conditioning refused to work, and the stove needed fixing. Still, they said they hoped to fully reopen on Valentine’s Day, and start serving brunch this weekend. “Just to get cash flowing in,” Ms. Swenson said, “and to figure out what we need to do to make it work.”

To the south, a block west off Van Brunt, in the back room of a dark and dusty bar, an old man was gently plucking a tune from a guitar. His face, curtained by steely gray hair, was fixed with a childlike smile, and his eyes were closed. The man, Sunny Balzano, is the owner of Sunny’s. He and his wife, Tone Balzano Johansen, enjoyed a very successful Internet fund-raising campaign after the storm, but repairs were creeping along, and being done entirely by volunteers. On this day, the repair team consisted of just one person, their friend Michael Horenstein, a carpenter who was fixing segments of the once-sodden floor.

The couple’s home next door still had no power, the first-floor furniture was piled high under thick plastic sheets, and they, along with their preteen daughter, were living out of their kitchen on the second floor.

“My life in a blender,” is how Ms. Johansen refers to it. She has stopped giving estimates on when the bar would open again, but said the support that had poured in had taken some of the sting out of the daunting, seemingly endless hurdles that lay ahead.

“The lows are incredibly low,” she said, “and the highs are incredibly high.”

A version of this article appears in print on January 17, 2013, on Page A21 of the New York edition with the headline: Flooded Businesses Set Goal to Reopen, But Obstacles Emerge. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe